The Secrets of Mary Bowser (44 page)

“Never mind if they is,” Hortense said. “Till them bluecoats is in the parlor, don’t mean nothing to us.” But I saw the curiosity writ across her face.

The noise wasn’t cannon, the booming low and steady, not like the angry bursts from the big field guns we heard the previous spring. Not letting on that I marked the difference, I turned to stripping the bed linens, musing over what the thunderous sound might mean.

I discovered the rest of the city was just as curious, when I pushed my way through the crowds lining Richmond’s streets that evening. Rumors hung in the acrid air along with smoke that stung my eyes and throat. An explosion, someone said. Down at Brown’s Island, in the Confederate Ordnance Laboratory. Scores of workers killed. Some crushed to death under the collapsed building. Others burned alive. Still more drowned after throwing themselves afire into the James. Most of the rest scorched and scarred so badly, they weren’t likely to survive.

I slowed alongside a crowd of whites gathered in front of Broad Street Methodist Church. A boy stood atop the church’s rounded steps, dwarfed beneath the soaring spire. Soot coated his face coonshow black. Pulling at his smutchy shirtsleeves, he described what he’d witnessed of the blast from his post at the Armory, across the channel from Brown’s Island. “I’fe nefer seen nuffink like it,” he declared. “Conflagramation like that, deffil himseff must of set it.”

The whole of Richmond seemed to share that harrowed boy’s horror as news of the explosion spread. The next day, Wilson’s shop was full of talk of the nearly forty women and children who died horrible deaths in the ordnance fire. But there was a bigger shock still in store for my husband and me, when McNiven turned up at our house Saturday night.

“ ’Tis a mighty advantage we take for oorselves this time.” He spoke with the closest I ever saw him come to glee.

“We?” I asked. I couldn’t place what he might mean.

“The disruption to the Brown’s Island manufactory,” McNiven explained. “Wasn’t our Mary Ryan a fine one, to think o’ jostling a case o’ friction primer, to ignite whatever gunpowder was floating in the shop.”

“Mary Ryan?” I recognized the name from the list of injured workers published in the
Enquirer
. “She’s not expected to live.”

“ ’Twould be plenty more dead from the munitions, if the wee lasses had finished their morning’s work.”

Neither Wilson nor I wanted to believe anyone we allied with could be proud over instigating such a thing. Wilson told McNiven so, rationing out his words in a low, quiet anger. “You start killing children, are you any better than what you’re fighting?”

“They say this war is become a true hell on earth, the most horrid thing what man has ever made,” McNiven answered. “But I suppose there be those of us what might still say slavery be the greater hell, the greatest sin. One what we maun destroy, the cost be what it will.”

Listening to this man I’d longed looked to as my comrade, I couldn’t apprehend whether I had more in common with him, or with the females he’d had a hand in killing.

When I first arrived in Philadelphia, Hattie told me whites could be as nasty to one another as they were to us. I’d been too wide-eyed to believe it, until Miss Douglass’s history lessons taught me it was true. Now McNiven’s scheming to kill girls and women proved it all over again.

But I wanted no part in such peccancy. Whatever animosity whites might feel for one another, at least I might make better use of it. And in such a manner as wouldn’t cost the lives of children.

Perhaps wealthy Richmond was too proud to acknowledge what poor Richmond muttered every day, but rich or poor, all had grown weary of war. Yet in the two days since the explosion, two years of discontent was suddenly forgotten, Virginians once again rallying to their Cause, vowing to sanctify those girls’ martyrdom.

Knowing we’d gain better advantage for our side if we played on white Southerners’ disgruntlement, I related the details of Mrs. Whitlock’s visit to Queen Varina. “There are more like Mrs. Whitlock, hungry and angry, than like your noble and self-immolating Mary Ryan,” I reminded McNiven. No one knows better than a slave how such festering hatred can explode. “Let the starving women and children be their own army against Jeff Davis. They may do yet more damage to the Confederacy than all the battering of Union mortar and cannon.”

The tocsin rang loud on the morning of the second April. It had been the city’s most feared sound before the war, meant to toll a slave uprising. Since ’61 we heard it often, whenever Union troops came near to Richmond. But when the clang of metal came that morning, it was neither slaves nor Federals that threatened. It was the fairer sex of Richmond.

I was in the Gray House yard, midway through hanging the wash. Hortense had gone up to Second Market, and Sophronia was scrubbing the front stoop, no doubt dawdling over the task to flirt with Tobias, her beloved groundsman. Likely not to notice if I slipped through the yard and down toward the Governor’s mansion.

I dried my hands on my apron as I hurried toward Capitol Square. McNiven had connived with two females to rile the crowd up, and as I came down Twelfth Street, I saw the pair standing before the white mob. One was about Bet’s age, though taller, with a long white feather in her hat. The other was younger and shorter, clutching an antiquated flintlock pistol. She raised it into the air and her sleeve fell back, revealing an arm no thicker than a broom handle. I wondered how many of the frayed and faded dresses in the crowd covered figures as wasted by hunger.

“Governor Letcher says he can’t speak with us just now,” she shouted. “He asks that we come back after breakfast.”

“My children haven’t got breakfast in six months,” someone in the crowd called out. Others jeered in agreement.

The older woman flashed an open-mouthed grin. “Well then, let us take our breakfast while the governor takes his.”

Her companion fired the flintlock into the air. The mob roared, pushing past Thomas Jefferson’s legislature building and the great bronze statue of George Washington astride his horse. They poured onto Ninth Street, jostling to make their way to Main.

I ducked along Tenth Street as frenzied mothers pushed their children down Shockoe Hill. By the time I turned onto Main, rioters had overrun a bakery. As they greedily devoured loaves of bread, others ran toward the grocers, seizing any foodstuffs they could grab. At the sound of breaking window glass, many forgot their hunger, turning instead on the clothing shops and fancy goods stores. The throng swarmed down side streets, onlookers joining the pillaging. Here or there, a soldier appeared but drew back quickly, unwilling to make a solitary attempt at restoring order.

“They are like jungle beasts, ready to tear the meat from their living prey.” Bet appeared at my side, clad in the calico bonnet and buckskin leggings she wore about the city. “To think Thomas could imagine such destruction.”

“It wasn’t McNiven who imagined it,” I said. “It was me.”

“You?” She was as surprised as if I’d sworn I’d been to the moon and back. “How ever did you get the idea?”

“A fat rat is as good as a squirrel,”
I said. “That’s Jeff Davis’s response whenever someone complains the poor of Richmond have no meat. The Secessionist version of Marie Antoinette’s
s’ils n’ont pas de pain, qu’ils mangent de la brioche
. It put me in mind of Mr. Dickens’s
A Tale of Two Cities
. Hunger festering into anger, anger to malice. Malice to lawlessness.”

I pointed to a familiar figure in the crowd, and Bet turned to see Mrs. Whitlock shoving her way through the street, clutching three pair of shoes in one arm and a tub of butter in the other. A flicker of recognition touched the distraught woman’s ruddy face when she saw her Church Hill neighbor. But she laughed and hurried on her way.

“And is that Virginia’s own Madame Defarge?” Bet asked.

Before I could respond, the Public Guard turned out in earnest. Jeff Davis struggled through the mob, climbing atop an overturned wagon to shout, “You must stop.” His words were barely audible over the hoots and cries of the looters. “The farmers won’t bring food to the city if they fear violence. And the Federals will hear of it and know we’re weak. It will be the end for us.”

As the crowd continued to push and shove, snatching up whatever was left to plunder, Davis ordered the Guard to load their rifles. Once the guns were readied, he shouted that the mob had better disperse or they’d be fired upon. He drew out his pocket watch and counted off three minutes. When he announced that time was up, the troops raised their rifles.

They clicked their guns to full cock, sending the women and children stampeding off in all directions. Amid the shrieking, I made for the James, pulling Bet along beside me.

“Would the Guard really have shot them?” she asked, once we’d taken cover against the brick wall of a foundry building on the canal.

I couldn’t know for certain. The Public Guard was paid in the same worthless Confederate currency as everyone else. Some of them may even have had wives and children among the rioters. But so long as both the Guard and the public believed Jeff Davis might have given the order to fire, he’d surely lost something of their loyalty, and their respect. And thus the victory was ours.

When Queen Varina returned to Richmond later that spring, she was wearing black for the father she’d just laid to rest. Though I knew full well the devastation of a daughter’s loss, I preferred to believe her melancholy might be premonitory mourning for the demise of her husband’s government.

Twenty-one

D
ammit, what are you saying?” Jeff Davis’s mood was so foul, I quite nearly pitied whoever climbed the staircase of the mansion to see him the afternoon of the eleventh July.

When word came four days earlier of the fall of Vicksburg, Davis had taken sick. When a telegram from Lee on the ninth confirmed the Confederate defeat at Gettysburg, his illness hardened into irascibility. Once Lee’s official report arrived late on the morning of the eleventh, Davis ordered his wife and children, even his secretary Burton Harrison, out of the Gray House. Hearing him cuss, I left off cleaning the third-floor rooms to creep down to the narrow office where Harrison usually worked, hoping the unexpected visitor was sharing yet more glad tidings for the Union.

“Do you not find the coincidence of twin defeats at Vicksburg and Gettysburg otherwise inexplicable, Mr. President?” Judah Benjamin’s voice startled me. The calculating Aunt Piss seldom petitioned Davis directly, preferring to make his appeals through Queen Varina.

Whatever brought him here set Davis barking so loudly, I didn’t need strain to make out his every word. “Johnston has made such a bumbling ass of himself since First Manassas, I am not surprised that he floundered the defense of Vicksburg.”

Aunt Piss usually disdained the braggart Joe Johnston just as much as Jeff Davis did, but for once he defended the general. “How could we expect otherwise, when Grant appears to have had clear knowledge of all attempts to reinforce our troops there? Just as Meade, one thousand miles away, appears to have known precisely when Early and Lee were taking their men into Union territory. Such information must have come from someone with access to the highest levels of Confederate correspondence.”

My heart lurched hard in my chest, and I squeezed myself tighter into the cubby-hole gap between Harrison’s writing desk and his bookcase. As though I could hide myself from what Aunt Piss must mean.

Davis’s reply confirmed my worst fears. “I am vilified in Congress, in the press, even in the streets. Now you say you think me such a simpleton as to be duped by a spy employed among my own household.”

Aunt Piss’s eager response drove icy thorns of fear deep into me, pricking me inside and out. “Do I have your permission to pursue the matter?”

“My honor is at stake if you do.”

Aunt Piss didn’t bother with any of his usual obsequience. “Your nation is at stake if I don’t. Good day, Mr. President.”

I watched Aunt Piss’s well-polished boots storm out from Davis’s office, half believing they’d sense my presence and kick me from my hiding spot.

“Investigate as you wish,” Davis called out. “If what you say is true, the culprit must hang.”

The Louisianan departed, and Davis returned to whatever occupied him at his desk in the adjoining room. But I remained huddled on the floor of Harrison’s office, my legs too weak to support me.

Jeff Davis never seemed to take notice of the house slaves. Such obliviousness, shared by all but the most lascivious Southern gentlemen, had afforded full protection for my indagations. Or so I’d always let myself believe.

I cudgeled my memory for any minor slip I might have made of late. But I was certain that every page I ever lifted from Davis’s desk, I’d taken care to return just as it was found. Perhaps that was my mistake. It flashed on me how Dulcey Upshaw used to leave my schoolwork out of order, illiteracy rendering her unable to hide that she’d been in my things. Maybe the risk was in always getting it right. Maybe I’d given too much intelligence to the Union, until the victories became otherwise inexplicable, as Aunt Piss said.

Aunt Piss. Immutably sly and scheming, it was no surprise he was the first to turn suspicious. Having gambled Davis’s goodwill to level his accusation, he’d hunt hard to deliver a culprit. And Davis would be swift enough to mete out punishment, if Aunt Piss’s charges proved true.

If—or when. For I knew Benjamin was right. The intelligence that brought Federal victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg had come from the Gray House itself.

“Don’t tell me nothing’s the matter,” Wilson insisted when he found me in our kitchen just past dawn the next morning. “Your one day of rest, and you keep yourself up all night rather than sleeping in. What’s troubling you?”

I didn’t care to lie to my husband. But I couldn’t bring myself to tell him what I’d heard. As though my repeating Aunt Piss’s suspicions would somehow bring the investigation to a faster and even more furious end.

“I’m feeling a bit poorly,” I said. That was true enough, trepidation cramping me up.